Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

SmartAboutThings writes "The United Kingdom online monitoring law just got published, showcasing some disturbing facts. The paper is 123 pages long and is actually a draft of the Communications Data Bill. You might not be so happy to find out that from now, every single thing you do online will be recorded and stored by the good old Internet Service providers (ISP). What do we mean by online activity? Well, everything."

You might be doing nothing wrong and still have plenty to hide from some people. I don't consider going on vacation wrong but I don't broadcast to the internet that my house will be vacant.

What if you don't support the controlling political party? You might value some anonymity.

Sure if the government, and all the individuals within it that have access to that data, are always perfectly honorable you might never have a problem. Does this seem like a likely situation for you to stake your life or wellbeing on?

Giving that much power to the government is just begging one power hungry corrupt individual to abuse it to gain more power.

The Guardian article you linked was part of the media coverage that led to the clarifications such as that Met police statement, so it was very helpful at the time, but is no longer completely accurate.

All criminals wear clothing. Clothes can be used to hide weapons or drugs, mask your identity, and blend into crowds.

Therefore, we should make it unlawful to wear clothing. It will make it easier for the police to do their jobs. After all, if you've done nothing wrong -- and you've been to the gym and haven't been at the crisps again -- you've got nothing to hide, do you?

Ex., Madonna's nipple slips out at 18 - Good times. Madonna's nipple slips out at 35 - Kind of cool. Madonna's nipple slips out at 50 - I want to be able to eat later on. Madonna's nipple slips out at 85 - Jesus Christ, isn't there an orderly around here to take care of this poor lady?

A paper on privacy [ssrn.com] and why "monitoring is no problem because only criminals have something to hide" is a poor justification. If you compare the benefits of monitoring for the good of society against the usually slight or non-existant damage to an individual from being monitored, society always wins out. However, privacy is not just monitoring. What affect does it have on society when everyone is aware that there are large databases of information about your life and people will use to make decisions about

There would be less anonymity initially for sure. If you had a thousand people, and only 10 people started using TOR right away, they just painted a target on themselves.

You won't be anonymous, but you will still remain private (assuming encryption is not illegal too. Once the scales tip at about 30-40% there is no longer any detriment in anonymity since the costs of investigating and implementing extra monitoring on that many nodes would be very cost prohibitive.

none of the population (many of who are convinced by "won't somebody please think of the children?") actually seem to give a damn.

I give a damn and I'm British. It does make one wonder what we bothered to fight the Communists for. All the stuff they did seems to be perfectly acceptable to the baby boomers in this country as long as you do it under the banner of "fighting crime/terrorism". Maybe people just didn't want to learn Russian.

The reason is simple: the powers that be *want* this. Much like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and whatever the current generation mutant strain is, keeps getting brandished about like a giant black rubber donkey dildo. The public says no, but the powers that be want to fuck us. They keep whipping out dildo after dildo, refusing to take the hint that we *DON'T WANT ANY* dildos, not just that specific one.

When they finally manage to snooker us into taking it (all the way I might add, without any lube), then they tell all their friends about it, and from then on, that type of dildoing becomes standard practice, for everyone, everywhere.

What we need is to propose counter legislation FORBIDDING proposals of this type. Simply defeating every proposed terror dick they whip out of their rape kit won't work.

Even that isn't true. The Lib Dems are pretty strongly opposed to this, as are some high profile Tories, David Davis being probably the most obvious figurehead.

This is the usual power grab by police/security services/whoever, backed by the usual FUD about terrorism and organised crime. It's probably also something of a "We can still be friends, right?" from the Home Office to the police, whom the government in general and the current Home Secretary in particular have annoyed a lot in recent weeks.

Something might get through, but I very much doubt it will look anything like this by the time it's been done over by civil libertarians, ISPs who would have to foot the bill, and people who actually have a clue about technology. We as a nation might be far less protective of our privacy than I personally would like, but we're not completely clueless. Look at the way ID cards were beaten down, despite a huge push from government. More recently, look at the way the way the government at EU level has turned against ACTA, despite the national governments of almost every member state already ratifying it and publicly claiming they support it.

Even in the US, where the popular claim is that the government don't care about anything much any more, look how fast the politicians got educated about SOPA and PIPA and in many cases completely flipped their position after the entire Internet decided to teach them that these things matter. A lot of the time, the problem is that the legislators are naive and just listen to the loudest voices; never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by incompetence, as the old saying goes.

You're right that certain organisations will keep trying. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be. It's not exactly the spies' job to look out for people's privacy, after all. We just have to make sure that the other side of the debate is heard as well, and that anything that reaches the statute books is a sensible balance between the competing interests.

What makes you think that the powers that be are the representatives/senators/MPs/whatevers?

Multinational interests have powers that flow fluidly accross multiple political jurisdictions. They are the ones that want the dildo in your hole.

They won't stop until they are either told sraight up that they can't, or until they succeed in getting one rammed in there.

Despite what they might say, multinational corporations are not people. They are not human. They don't tire of devising ever more terrifying dicks to aim at you. They never get tired of trying, because they know that as long as they keep at it, they will eventually succeed.

If you think accepting a tiny dildo as a compromise is a sensible solution to the problem, I have only one thing to say:

Well, I'm from Cambridge, where our Lib Dem MP not only stood by his promise to students but also has a clue when it comes to technical matters and is one of the more prominent voices in Parliament [techweekeurope.co.uk] trying to restore some sanity to this particular debate. So while I have little sympathy with the Lib Dems who got into government and then stabbed the students in the back, just as I had little sympathy when the last Labour MP here made a similar mistake and later lost her seat, I don't agree that all Lib Dems a

With the requirement to store every single thing users do, it might be a good time to invest in EMC because it is going to require an enterprise (VNX level) SAN to record all what is going on, as well as the licenses for features like deduplication (since a bunch of troll posts are usually alike, the SAN can store one copy, and pointers to the others.)

As a user in the UK, I'd be looking to find the best always-on VPN service, one in the country (since some services are country-locked), and one situated some

Sweden have been doing this shit for years already, and here in Norway the politicians are working their asses off to log everything, too. Only, not one of those politicians have any clue about computers, so they still have no idea what should be logged (and thus it's still not active, even tho it should be active from April this year).

And, as an extra bonus, they leave the bill to the ISP's. Because, you know, anything else would be expensive.

You might not be so happy to find out that from now, every single thing you do online will be recorded and stored by the good old Internet Service providers (ISP). What do we mean by online activity? Well, everything. From exchanging emails, browsing history, instant messaging to the most important use of social networks.

For stuff like emails, wont encryption be an issue?And for other stuff, storing the MASSIVE amounts of dataI have no stats to back this up, but on a national level, wont the storage requirement touch Petabytes per day? (or atleast 100's of Terabytes per day?)

Currently they store the from and to addresses of all emails sent, as well as the subject line, date stamp and IP address of the machine connecting to the server (usually your router, but not always). Encryption makes no difference as you can't encrypt the headers since obviously the server needs to read them.

For web monitoring they record the domain name of every site requested by each connection. It isn't clear how it is implemented, but presumably it is some kind of DPI to intercept HTTP requests rather

Why aren't their riots in the streets over this? For years I have heard about Europe being very pro-privacy. I have even worked with their privacy standards from a professional standpoint.

What went wrong? Seriously, how on earth did this ever happen? Your cars and your online activities are all being monitored by your government with your blessing! The communists never had it that good, all they got were phone calls and letters. You gave your own government a blessing to invade your privacy at a level the East German's could have only dreamed of. Something is very, very wrong in UK today. What the hell happened?

Europe is not entirely united. There is a lot of national variation. The UK is particually susceptable to the old 'think of the children' - we've been in a pedophile-panic here for years that is even worse than in the US.

We try to pretend they don't exist, and nudists live in fear because they know that if anything looks even the remotest bit suggestive involving children then they'll have a lynch mob coming to visit. Just run an image search on 'nudist' - you'll notice that children are entirely absent, because no-one would be dumb enough to share that part of the photo album with the world.

Yes what the hell happened? The Tory party when in opposition opposed the National ID Card scheme, on the basis of privacy concerns and cost. They and their supporters often quoting George Orwell. As soon as they were in power they cancelled the scheme.

Now the very same part are going to spy on what everyone does on the internet, and it's going cost 1.5 billion UKP. At a time when all public services are being cut back.

Even accepting the fact that they are huge hypocrites, this does not make sense.

Why aren't their riots in the streets over this? For years I have heard about Europe being very pro-privacy. I have even worked with their privacy standards from a professional standpoint.

Because this is a bill that hasn't been voted on, much less passed and will more than likely be knocked back by the House of Lords so many times it'll be re-drafted into something impotent. The summary isn't merely wrong, it's practically as bad as the Daily Mail in terms of hyperbole:

"You might not be so happy to find out that from now, every single thing you do online will be recorded and stored by the good old Internet Service providers (ISP)." (emphasis mine)

What went wrong? Seriously, how on earth did this ever happen? Your cars and your online activities are all being monitored by your government with your blessing!

By cars, I expect you mean the ANPR cameras that check for valid tax and insurance. These are always accompanied by signs letting you know they're there, just like speed cameras.

The communists never had it that good, all they got were phone calls and letters.

Indeed, I imagine that very few people in Soviet Bloc countries had access to the Internet or their own cars

You gave your own government a blessing to invade your privacy at a level the East German's could have only dreamed of.

Yeah... sure.

Something is very, very wrong in UK today. What the hell happened?

Nothing happened; the press still use sensationalism and the people are still subject to about the same level of surveillance as in most other First World countries. And before someone trots out the millions of CCTV cameras thing again, let me just say that it's been debunked so many times it doesn't even merit a citation.

By cars, I expect you mean the ANPR cameras that check for valid tax and insurance. These are always accompanied by signs letting you know they're there, just like speed cameras.

Even if you are right, and I don't know that you are: In what way does the existence of signs make it in any way OK? In case you've forgotten, in 2001, the state had lots of signs saying "Big Brother is watching you."

I didn't say it did, but clearly marked cameras aren't really comparable to the near-omnipresent electronic panopticon* that was portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four (a minor niggle: the book isn't called 1984). Besides which, there's a big difference between surveillance of certain public places/roads and a telescreen in every home. There's also a difference between looking for "thoughtcrime" amongst the public and catching uninsured drivers on the roads or violent criminals in the streets.

I expect you mean the ANPR cameras that check for valid tax and insurance. These are always accompanied by signs letting you know they're there, just like speed cameras.

Firstly, they are not all accompanied by signs. Many trunk roads have fixed ANPR cameras which aren't marked. All the police's traffic cars (including unmarked cars) have ANPR cameras and don't have any signs. Even back in 2010 there were over 4000 ANPR cameras [guardian.co.uk] operating with absolutely no regulatory oversight.

Secondly, the cameras are hardly just used to "check for valid tax and insurance". Some are operated by the Ministry of Defence, FFS. Every plate checked has its location, time (and in many cases a ph

There is some hope. There was a bit on the radio today about a company offering free wifi in London, and when they interviewed a few potential users all of them asked what the company was getting out of it and what personal data they wanted. A couple mentioned spying on users too. It seems that a lot of young people are at least aware of privacy issues.

There is some hope. There was a bit on the radio today about a company offering free wifi in London, and when they interviewed a few potential users all of them asked what the company was getting out of it and what personal data they wanted. A couple mentioned spying on users too. It seems that a lot of young people are at least aware of privacy issues.

That would be Virgin Media snooping on people's web browsing on that Wifi. The funny thing about the UK is that people seem to have a problem with private c

"If you have nothing to hide, then why complain?" - That's what they said when I told them I refused to open my car for the police. They'll probably say the same when I say the police should not be recording our websurfing.

"If you have nothing to hide, then why complain?" - That's what they said when I told them I refused to open my car for the police. They'll probably say the same when I say the police should not be recording our websurfing.

For people who refuse to understand principles, sometimes making it personal will work.Stick a keylogger on their computer and, after a week, tell them what you've done."If you have nothing to hide, then why complain?"

I definitely don't like the idea of my online activities being monitored since I value my privacy very highly.

On the other hand, governments are in a bit of a bind. They are responsible for enforcing the law and creating an effective justice system. This is incredibly difficult for them to do given the scope of activities that can (and do) take place online. After all, you can't exactly place a police officer on a beat to keep the peace without having some sort of electronic monitoring. Likewise, you cannot collect evidence to prove innocence or guilt without maintaining some sort of record of electronic transactions.

I don't know where the solutions to these problems lay. That being said, I would suggest that those of us who oppose electronic surveilence start thinking about solutions to this problem. After all, governments need a way to do their job, and simply opposing legislation like this doesn't exactly help them do their job.

Same way they do it now: Put a police officer on "the beat" and watching for illegal activity like stealking credit numbers, or adults trying to seduce children. OF COURSE the more-likely outcome is 100% recording of everything we do, followed by some Mussolini type leader using the info to "disappear" his online enemies. (Or less onerous, government forcing newssites to publish gov't propaganda & erasing anti-government posts/replies.)

So long as the governments of the world continue to work in a bubble of their closest supporters, cranking out bills like this without actually consulting the people (or even panels of industry experts), we're going to shoot down every goddamn one and make their lives as miserable as possible until they understand we, the citizens who elected them, need to be a part of this process. Or put simply, they've never asked for our input on a solution. That's not how it works where I live, at least. Maybe one day

1) Unless a portion of the crime takes place in the physical world, it is very difficult to gather the evidence required to obtain a warrant. In those cases some form of electronic monitoring would be required in order to obtain that evidence. At the very least you need to know that computer A connected to computer B. Those records should be external to computer A and computer B since neither party is likely to maintain logs or, if they do maintain logs, they are possib

I don't see how having access to everything done by everyone in a nation will help them. Information overload. If they're using it to fight crime, the crime has to occur first. And the potential privacy implications of such a database as well as the identity theft/blackmail potential is simply unreasonable as a counterweight to the gains.

fter all, governments need a way to do their job, and simply opposing legislation like this doesn't exactly help them do their job.

Actually, it does. In the old days, when you wanted to know what someone was up to, you used something called an "eyeball" to watch them. Governments are lazy -- they want dragnets, they want all electronic data available for inspection for any reason, without a warrant. They want retroactive immunity for torturing and murdering civilians. But arguments that they can't do their job here are bullshit: I can put a video camera that watches your screen and keyboard and know what you're up to online, and those

I do. Warrants. If you need data, get yourself probable cause and present it to a judge. If you don't have probable cause, fuck off and die. If you have probable cause, you'll get your warrant, and you can record the data you had probable cause to believe would provide evidence for a crime.

How is this difficult in any way? I mean, let's apply your logic to other times when a warrant would be required:

Are you naive?Regarding your second argument, "need for evidence", It is collected AFTER a crime has been convicted AND someone is a SUSPECT. It has never been our western tradition to go and treat the innocent like guilty. That is why you have forensic sciences and such to gather evidence, and believe me, there is nothing as resilient as a disk drive. You would have to melt down your drive for someone not to be able to read it. That's why police are making their job HARDER, not easier with such laws. Now i

See the "people are too stupid to run a democracy" study published a few months back.

Really, here in the US, there's no benefit to doing the right thing - or anything. You'll get lambasted from both sides no matter what choice you make. Objective political reporting is dead, if it ever existed. Satisfying the donors and behind the scenes manipulators is about the only approval you can expect.

And that's our (the voting public's) fault. We have become unwilling to compromise and negotiate and instead we p

And that's our (the voting public's) fault. We have become unwilling to compromise and negotiate and instead we prefer highly publicized stand offs over minute issues while our paid taxes slowly swirl down the drain.

Uh, no. The problem is far too much compromise.

The Bad Guys view compromise as weakness and after they've convinced the Good Guys to compromise away part of their freedom, they come back in a year or two demanding more. Then repeat until it's all gone.

Only a total no-compromise attitude can prevent that, and the Good Guys are too good to do that. This nonsense will only stop when the majority are willing to say 'No More' and mean it.

How do they record your secure web activities? Seems the only thing they can know from it is where your HTTPS requests are going to. And what about the VPN set up to friends in free countries like Norway and Sweden?

Communications are private. This is one of the bases of democracy. If you lose that, and you spy on the citizens, then you are already inside the dictatorship style of society. You CAN'T do that, not even to stop a nuclear explosion to destroy a city or something massive like that. Is one of the pilars of our society, and the other options are worse. Plus, we choose to live in democracy, is our choose, nobody should overrule that and force a dictatorship on everyone.

From the first few pages of the document, they are talking about communication data but not content - i.e. source, destination, perhaps size. Stuff ISPs probably log but might not store. It is explicitly excluding content

It's still not great, but to take a telephone analogy it's like the itemised billing stats, not recording all the calls. Or a physical example - getting the post office to record the address written on the envelope, but not open it and read the contents.

It's not "from now on". The proposal has been published. It is not a law, and is unlikely to ever become one.

Do you hate us because we're free, timothy? Is that what it is?

Oh I don't know about that. My mother having lived under the STASI and been a part of the underground in her teenager years, I'm quite sure that they would have been rubbing their hands in glee over such a proposed law. This is a statists wet dream, and goes beyond a pure fantasy in terms of what would be considered an invasion of privacy.

Besides, the UK isn't free. And the veneer is wearing thin in many places. Otherwise, you wouldn't see Brits fleeing to places like Canada or Australia in such large n

I'd like to see their working on the financial figures. According to the document the Bill "is estimated to lead to an
increase in public expenditure of up to £1.8 billion over 10 years from 2011/12. Benefits from
this investment are estimated to be £5 – 6.2 billion over the same period."

Exactly what financial benefits? Where's the saving?

Otherwise, the question we should all, in the UK, be asking our MPs is which hospitals are going to be closed to pay for this?

They could be analyzing in real time, which would vastly shrink the storage needed.

That said this legislation should greatly push the general public toward encryption of all usage, hand in hand with periodic disclosure of government abuse over time. Since not just the bad guys are being surveilled. Of course it is the same as what happens in other European / North American countries one could presume, they are just putting it into law that the public can see..

As more and more non-criminal people are forced to use more and more encryption, this will just make more and easier choices available, even for the criminals. But the government may also try to make all use of encryption illegal, too, thus turning everyone into a criminal.

I think Governments need to be very very careful about going down this route. Should this go ahead I expect any ciminals to encrypt all their network traffic via a VPN or proxy as well as measrues such as sending emails encryped via PGP.

That's easy. It's already a crime in the UK to refuse to hand over encryption keys. They don't even have to prove that you have the encryption keys, or that the allegedly encrypted data is actually encrypted.

Before long mere use of encryption, or even possession of random data that could be mistaken for encrypted data will be illegal in the UK.

It's an interesting yet terrifying time. The limitations of law enforcement are becoming less technical and more social. Technology is creating the potential for massively effective law enforcement, at a cost of massive loss of personal freedom. As a society we have to figure out where we want to draw that line. How much safety do we want to trade for how much privacy.

The terrifying part is that society isn't really deciding so much as certain interested parties pushing in one direction and people en mass shrugging and going about their day.

Technology is creating the potential for massively effective law enforcement, at a cost of massive loss of personal freedom.

And of course it's not just enabling law enforcement, but selective enforcement, identity theft, figuring out when a person won't have an alibi to frame them, tracking dissidents/competitors/rivals, and all sorts of other evils.

You're correct in that the limitations set to grant privacy and freedom must be a strict social contract with accountability, paper trails, and monitored checks/balances in place, because the technical capability to breach them is simply too easy.

Think about this anecdote: kids are on a school trip (at least, that's how I remember it). Their professors don't want them to leave their rooms during the night, so they put small pieces of tape on the door of the kids' rooms. This way, they think it'll be easy to spot the rooms whose door has been opened, the next morning. One night, some clever kids get out of their room and, to cover up their tracks, instead of attempting to repair the tape on their own door, open everybody else's door.

As a metaphor for a person in power so busy looking for threats internally (students leaving rooms) that they leave themselves wide open to external threats (all the bedroom doors are unlocked for easy access to sleeping children), it's great.

95% will continue oblivious to the dangers of mass surveillance. Those concerned about freedom and privacy have solutions...for now.

And the criminals, of course. They've already started to use separate phones, or just leave them at home when doing misdeeds.

And a decent VPN / TOR is not THAT hard to get going. And if it really is that hard to get going, then I'm sure they have some cash to hire a geek to fix it up for them.

And even that's not really needed.. I read about one drug network that was run over facebook, with fake (female) profiles. Using separate laptops to log in with. Only reason why police found out about it was that one o

I wonder what's my liablity for not doing anything about mass surveillance. If you want to prevent crimes you want to reduce the number of suspects. Labeling a lot of people "potential terrorist" is instead a way to curb people discontent. Behave, Big brother watches you.And besides, all corrupt systems try to criminalize as many people as possible, it's difficult to control people which can easily live a clean life, it's pretty easy if you can get sent to court no matter what.

Here, we are simply shifting electrons around, real wealth and power are elsewhere.

People used to make just sound waves with their own mouths. Those waves couldn't propagate farther than a few meters. Still, those people were often arrested, imprisoned and killed. A technology that allows anyone to talk to unlimited audience over unlimited distances [on this planet] is far more dangerous.

Speech in general is dangerous. All palace revolts, all military coups, all popular revolutions started with people who were speaking.

In an ideally peaceful society free speech would be completely outlawed. Without being able to communicate you can only lead a revolt of one, easily suppressable. However such a society is likely to stagnate (see USSR.)

The real problem with human societies is the people. Someone always wants something from others, be it money or power or attention. Those are called "troublemakers." But this is normal behavior for homo sapiens. We might just as well ask molecules to stop their Brownian motion. It's what they are.

Democracy allows free speech on a slim chance that some of those new proposals are beneficial. In practice new political leaders only want to unseat current political leaders, and they use the people as fuel and cannon fodder for their purposes. Will Romney be better than Obama? Or worse? Or the same? Nobody knows; this is quantum information - the act of listening to either of those politicians changes the message. On top of that, the electorate is usually not even aware of all pertinent facts - because the facts are hard to find and because they are hard to comprehend. The electorate simply remembers who called them last and votes for that guy.

I could even understand if a government would offer zero free speech in exchange for absolute safety and stability. But this is not going to happen, in any country. You would lose your free speech but the government would be even more abusive. Losing your freedom of speech (or freedom of speaking anonymously) does not come with any benefits whatsoever. Not to you, at least. The government benefits mightily.

Similarly, Communists in 1917 Russia used their free speech (not really a right, but they had it anyway) to kill tens of millions in 20th century. A certain other person, let he remain unmentioned here, used his right of free speech (which he did have) to construct one of evilest empires in history of the planet. (Pol Pot is nervously smoking in the corner.)

Inverse it is, yes.

It's not those you've mentioned whose power of free speech is the active vector here.

It is the elimination/suppression of other speech that is the evil part, and enables further evil.

The answer to speech you dislike/disagree with is always *more* speech (voice your views as well), not less (suppressing/silencing opposing voices/opinions), in any society that could reasonably be called "free".

The US is falling into this abyss as well as the UK, under an ever-expanding government. To my "scoring", the UK is ahead in blatant, "in your face" public domestic surveillance, but the US is far ahead in covert domestic surveillance.

And please, let's not bring out that tired "shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theater" thing in this thread. That's been rehashed to death on/. and elsewhere. This is about political speech.